What I'm Watching: My Neighbor Totoro

by Ethan de Seife Posted on May 22, 2016 at 10:03AM

Many, many things about the Academy Awards annoy and repulse me, but I am most galled by the mere existence of the category Best Animated Film. All film is, in fact, animation, and the separation ghettoizes "animation."

What I'm Watching: The Trust

by Ethan de Seife Posted on May 14, 2016 at 9:01AM

What I'm Watching: Premium Rush

by Ethan de Seife Posted on May 7, 2016 at 9:01AM

What I'm Watching: Inside Man

by Ethan de Seife Posted on April 30, 2016 at 9:00AM

What I'm Watching: "Heavy Metal Parking Lot"

by Ethan de Seife Posted on April 23, 2016 at 9:00AM

What I'm Watching: "How High Is Up?"

by Ethan de Seife Posted on April 16, 2016 at 9:05AM

I put quotation marks around the word “low-brow” above because I detest the false distinction between “high” and “low” art. The films of the Three Stooges may have been low-budget, and they may feature a lot of mallets to the head, but that doesn’t mean they are somehow intrinsically inferior to other films.

What I'm Watching: Duane Roelands' "Joke Life" Vines

by Ethan de Seife Posted on April 9, 2016 at 9:00AM

I don’t care to comment on the allegedly shrinking modern attention span, but I will say that Roelands’ Vines are perfectly designed as tiny bursts of comedy. You’ll lose none of your precious productivity by watching a couple.

What I'm Watching: Westworld

by Ethan de Seife Posted on April 2, 2016 at 9:11AM

On a structural level, Crichton includes far too many scenes of technicians puzzling over malfunctioning robots. He brings us down into their subterranean computer cave at least a dozen times, but none of these scenes builds narrative knowledge or suspense.

What I'm Watching: Detroit 9000

by Ethan de Seife Posted on March 26, 2016 at 9:01AM

This “one at a time” editing strategy is somewhat strange, and one could make the case that it’s less suspenseful than alternating editing would be. Furthermore, had Marks employed alternating editing in this scene, one could say he was explicitly using this device to “bookend” his story: one major scene of alternating editing at the beginning, and another at the end.

What I'm Watching: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

by Ethan de Seife Posted on March 19, 2016 at 9:00AM

The first time I saw Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, it was on a ninth-generation VHS tape that one of my college film-nerd friends had dug up somewhere. Upon recently rewatching it for the first time in 20 years (thanks for the heads-up, Bobby!), I found it even more thought-provoking than I did when I was one of those film nerds.